The Internet has been pretty depressing lately (see: racist Hunger Games tweets, ignorant peeps who legitimately didn't know the Titanic was "like, a real-life thing!???!!") but if this doesn't make you smile even a little bit, you're probably a robot.

Bennett is a seventeen-year-old white bro who "thinks he's a Crip" and has trouble spelling. Also, he is hilarious. Inexplicably, Bennett has a really bright, well-spoken (well-texted) cousin who he texts regularly about things like "lasanya" and whether it's cool to bring an Indian girl to Thanksgiving dinner.

Author
William Gibson has been called the father of cyberpunk and coined the
term "cyberspace" back when Internet was little more than a twinkle in DARPA's eye.
That's enough to mean that he's probably developed a fan base devout
enough to build shrines in his honor, or at least commemorative iPad
apps.

But
if you ask Gibson himself -- like one audience member did during a
Brookline Booksmith reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre last year --
it still doesn't make him a celebrity.

Scared? We are too. And so is author Siva Vaidhyanathan, who read from his recent release The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) at the Harvard Book Store earlier this afternoon.

But if you happened to miss it -- or if you walked out of there craving more, MORE -- we've got just the ticket for you, pulled from our own bottomless podcast vault: two readings from similarly tech-wary authors Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains) and William Powers (Hamlet's Blackberry):

There are far too few advocates in the world for teenagers navigating the difficulties of dealing with shit IRL, and even fewer who give a shit about how teens actually relate in digital spaces. As for researchers who manage to make sense about the way real life and digital life interact -- well, there's pretty much only one must-read digital ethnographer, and that's Boston's DANAH BOYD

I see from
how you just rolled up on a motor scooter that you're a bad-ass as well as
mayor of the diner. How's that working out for you?Well, scootering is actually one of the best ways to get
around the city if biking isn't available.

Spoiler alert: if you're a film geek, the rest of your work day is about to go up in flames.

Criterion launched a long-awaited new web site this morning, taking the first step towards digital distribution for the most coveted catalogue in film. Warning: It's still in wicked beta. But the plan is to let users stream full-length movies -- as well as Criterion's extras, from the accompanying essays to the directors' commentaries, behind-the-scenes vids, and short features -- on demand.

And speaking of not detoxing, here's more shizzle from the Interwebs. Garfield Minus Garfield
is exactly how it sounds: the lonely, depressing tale of John Arbuckle
or, as the GMG mastermind puts it: "Who would have guessed that when
you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an
even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty
desperation of modern life?" A sampling: